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The usual Monday comfort fare of (mainly) cds, dds, and anagrams from Rufus. Enjoyable, even if short in solving. Thanks to Rufus. Definitions are underlined in the clues. [[The pictures at the bottom have unidentified links to the puzzle. Please enclose any comments on them in double brackets. Thank you.]]

IN A PANIC : I plus(take) NAP(a short rest) placed before(before) anagram of(recover) I CAN.

26 Burden we can’t avoid? (4)

ONUS : Cryptic defn: We can’t avoid it if it’s “on us”.

27 Explosive magazine article (9)

GUNPOWDER : Cryptic defn: Explosive material;article found in a magazine;a building or room for storing munitions.

Down1 Restrictions for members in clubs (5)

IRONS : Double defn: 1st: Physical restrictions;shackles for the arms and legs;members; and 2nd: Golf clubs originally made of, well, iron, in contrast to those made of wood (or nowadays synthetic material).

Answer: Collins gives rigidity;tautness;stiffness as synonyms of tension. An example I can think of is of muscles being under tension and rigid, though mostly, rigid things are not/need not be in tension.

20 A local employee? (7)

BARMAID : Cryptic defn: One who tends bar in an inn;a local;the watering place near you which you frequent.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 15th, 2013 at 8:15 am and is filed under Guardian.
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27 Responses to “Guardian Cryptic 25922 Rufus”

After an enforced absence from crossword solving this was a great way to SET OFF again. Thanks Rufus for being so kind this Monday morning and thanks scchua for clarifying the parsing of one or two I had guessed at. I liked ONUS and EXECUTION.

[[The pond skater on the bottom row uses the surface TENSION to stay afloat and would sink if detergent is added. The fish on the top row is I think an electric ray so an electric discharge could be TURNED ON to stun its prey]]

A quick solve – no harm with a busy day ahead. The usual fare with perhaps a few more anagrams than I expected.I was held up momentarily by thinking that 2d would be Trident but crossing answers soon put this right.

[[The bottom right was so familiar. Finally I recalled he is Ian Thorpe, the Australian Olympic swimmer, nicknamed not only Thorpey, but also the THORPEDO. He was an excellent pundit in the BBC coverage of the 2012 games.]]

Yes, a quick solve, but as always we got stuck on just one.
This time it was NILGAI (24ac).

When Trailman @9 says “NILGAI was new”, how on earth did he decide that it had to be NILGAI?
Why not LINGAI, NIAGLI or AINGLI?
For me, this is something not really fair about this clue.
Unless you know the beast.
Ah well.

Some nice surfaces today, but I fear 1ac (IN TRANSIT) is not one of them, although perhaps it should be. In my/our opinion the word “the” stands in the way of making this a really good clue. As a blogger at another place (the FT, Rufus being Dante) I have frequently said that I have become immune to Rufus/Dante using articles where I think he shouldn’t. Still, 1ac could have been so much better by deleting “The”.

In my view for words like NILGAI it is completely legitimate to use either a dictionary, encyclopaedia or online resource to check what you think is the answer. It was obviously an anagram (especially when the crossing FOUNDLING gave an “I” at the end) – given the fodder and the crossing letters there were only 6 possibilities to check: NILGAI, NIAGLI, LINGAI, LIAGNI, AINGLI, AILGNI – it was good fortune for me that the first of these turned out to be “a large, Indian antelope, Boselaphus tragocamelus, the male of which is bluish grey with small horns, the female tawny and hornless” but it really wouldn’t have taken much longer to nail the answer if it had been one of the others.

Of course, under competition conditions I would have had to take pot luck, but I can’t really foresee many instances where the pleasant diversion of a Monday Rufus and a crossword solving competition will be mentioned in the same breath…

Very satisfying for an improving cruciverbalist. I had Debunk for 9ac – to “un” a K, which seemed to be as legitimate as debris, and I only knew it was wrong because I couldn’t solve 7 down. Also I had worked out that 24ac was an anagram, and had all the available letters, but got bored going through my shorter oxford to fing the right word. But apart from these two irritants the puzzle was very satifying, I particularly liked BRAVO.

I was intrigued by your comment about 24ac, and wondered if you had any of the crossing letters (from EXECUTION, RENEGES and FOUNDLING) before you attempted the anagram. With no crossing letters at all then an anagram of 6 letters, two of which are the same, has 360 possible solutions. If however you had either of EXECUTION or FOUNDLING (placing one of the ‘I’s) then this would have been narrowed to 120 permutations. With neither, but instead just having the ‘G’ from RENEGES there would be 60 to check. A combination of any two of the crossing letters and you are down to 24, and as I stated above with all three crossing letters in place there are just 6. Now even given the fact that most of the permutations of any 6 letters are clearly not words, I can quite understand why sifting through the SOD would quickly become tedious if you don’t have any crossing letters to help, but surely 6 possibilities can be checked in just a couple of minutes?